Agency employees then called the lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans, working off a script that said letting California implement its own emissions controls on automakers could create "a patchwork of regulations on vehicle emissions which would have significant impacts on the light truck and car industry."

Random obsession yesterday. I was trying to remember the name of a friend and work colleague who had died about seven years ago, but I could come up with only his first name. Thwarted, I tried to recall friends who had died much earlier in my youth and could do no better. This saddened me because a long time ago, I had vowed not to lose the memory of one of the first new friends I made after moving to New York. Joe Ponciano lived in White Plains and died of a heart attack while on vacation (scuba diving near Trinidad, if I am not mistaken). Sorry I forgot about you for a moment.

Interestingly, Rock the Bells tickets for the NYC 7/28 show have gone on sale again. Resale prices on Ebay have fallen sharply. I decided to buy a VIP ticket afterwards, but there's no way I will get $160 for my remaining GA ticket (that was after exorbitant Ebay/Paypal fees). Days after the first sellout, GA tickets were going for $200+. I saw a few this evening on Craigslist listed at $60... Anyways, I'm pretty fired up for this.

New version of WordPress is out apparently, and I was prompted to upgrade this morning. Doing so caused special characters to appear as unreadable. YUCK. Had to give myself a quick MySQL refresher while rolling everything back. Exporting posts before upgrading and then reimporting them into a brand new installation seems to have worked fine, but I blew out the blogroll in the process and ended up reconstructing it by hand.

In exchange for American backing, these officials say, the Sunni groups have agreed to fight Al Qaeda and halt attacks on American units.

[snip]

Americans officers acknowledge that providing weapons to breakaway rebel groups is not new in counterinsurgency warfare, and that in places where it has been tried before, including the French colonial war in Algeria, the British-led fight against insurgents in Malaya in the early 1950s, and in Vietnam, the effort often backfired, with weapons given to the rebels being turned against the forces providing them. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the Third Infantry Division and leader of an American task force fighting in a wide area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers immediately south of Baghdad, said at a briefing for reporters on Sunday that no American support would be given to any Sunni group that had attacked Americans. If the Americans negotiating with Sunni groups in his area had “specific information” that the group or any of its members had killed Americans, he said, “The negotiation is going to go like this: ‘You’re under arrest, and you’re going with me.’ I’m not going to go out and negotiate with folks who have American blood on their hands.”

One of the conditions set by the American commanders who met in Baghdad was that any group receiving weapons must submit its fighters for biometric tests that would include taking fingerprints and retinal scans. The American conditions, senior officers said, also include registering the serial numbers of all weapons, steps the Americans believe will help in tracing fighters who use the weapons in attacks against American or Iraqi troops. The fighters who have received American backing in the Amiriya district of Baghdad were required to undergo the tests, the officers said.

Pretty insane, yeah? Bring it on.

The requirement that no support be given to insurgent groups that have attacked Americans appeared to have been set aside or loosely enforced in negotiations with the Sunni groups elsewhere, including Amiriya, where American units that have supported Sunni groups fighting to oust Al Qaeda have told reporters they believe that the Sunni groups include insurgents who had fought the Americans.

Finally finished Original Zinn yesterday, which I highly recommend. Wanted to save this quote before I throw it on the bookshelf and forget it:

What has been really one of the terrible consequences of the militarization of the country is the starving of the public sector, the starving of education, of libraries, of health, of housing, and instead, of course, the pouring of money into activities that are enormously profitable for corporations.

This is why people become socialists. People become socialists in the way that I became a socialist when I read Upton Sinclair, and when I read Karl Marx, just to make it a little more dangerous. And that is the understanding that when you have a society where the production of things is based on their profitability, then the things that are not profitable will not be produced.

[snip]

It's not profitable to build housing for poor people. It is profitable to build nuclear weapons, profitable to build aircraft carriers and submarines. It is not profitable to build libraries or to build health care centers.

Project is approaching as close to a death march as I will likely see in this job. My thinking about work outside of the office is annoying. What keeps me fired up at work these days? Christina Aguilera. No joke. We saw her in February when she opened up the B2B tour, and as I look back, that was one of the best concerts I have attended even though I recognized only a handful of songs at the time. I put Stripped on the MP3 mix disc in my car to maintain a modicum of variety, but I almost always skipped it. Started listening to it recently, and I am hooked.